Faust seems to have exerted a big influence on Star Wars. You know, the "give up your soul for immortality" or something.

Once we know that people are human and have some Homer Simpson in them, then there's a lot that can be done to manipulate them.

It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong.

I started to read as obsessively about Star Wars as I once did about Kant - and still do about behavioral economics and behavioral psychology.

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

I'm interested in how the Internet spreads information.

I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.